


and I will stay up through the night

by Solanaceae



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 10:25:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3324098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/pseuds/Solanaceae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a mission goes bad, Skye finds herself alone with an injured May and the responsibility of getting them out alive. (Set between seasons 1 and 2. Written at the Galentine's Day 2015 exchange for geckoholic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	and I will stay up through the night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [geckoholic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/gifts).



It was, Skye had decided, very good that she had opted out of taking this mission on her own. All things considered, she would probably be dead right now, and while that wasn’t _much_ worse than her current situation - well, at least she wasn’t facing this alone.

This could be so much worse.

Or so she kept telling herself.

Her entire body was a map of dull aches that flared into bright pain every time she moved. She was probably developing a very nice bruise on the hip she’d been thrown onto when her captors shoved her into this cell. At least they’d missed the few shots they’d taken, or she’d have had a gun wound to worry about as well.

The cell was more like a storage closet - coat hooks embedded in one of the walls, no windows, a faint whiff of cleaning chemicals whenever she breathed too deeply. Unfortunately, the door was solid enough, no matter what this room had been in a previous life. She’d tested that first, bruising her bare feet kicking at it in search of weaknesses. Her wrists were raw, too, from where she had struggled against the zip ties binding them together behind her back.

Sitting against the wall was nearly impossible with her hands like that, so she’d settled for leaning into the corner, situated so she could keep an eye on the door. Not that there was much she could do from in here, of course.

Given enough time, a more qualified agent could have probably escaped.

Which was the entire problem, in Skye’s opinion.

SHIELD in hiding was far from a party, but thus far, Coulson had kept her from doing any serious fieldwork - kept her back at the base, puzzling through whatever enigma he had for her on any given day. She’d been itching to get out in the field for some time - play at being a real agent, for once - and _of course_ the first time she got a chance to, everything went to hell.

It was _supposed_ to have been an easy mission. In and out, grab some data off a computer in an office building that was a front for one of HYDRA’s many labs, slip right out the front door. It was one of those things that couldn’t be done by an inside agent, for some reason - Skye hadn’t quite gotten that bit of the explanation, something about self-contained computer banks and a lack of an inside agent. Regardless, she was still the best hacker SHIELD had.

 _I’m not sure about this,_ Coulson had said, lips pursed in that way he had as he swiped through a data feed. _Your skills are definitely the ones we need on the ground, but I still have concerns--_

 _And that’s why I’ll be going with her,_ May had interrupted, holstering her gun as she strode into the room.

Skye had to admit, she had felt a lot more secure knowing that May and her guns would be coming along. She hadn’t been doing that bad a job at target practice, but shooting at real people would be different. 

Even May had been taken by surprise when the secret HYDRA lab turned out to be a lot more militarized than their intel had given them reason to believe.

Her legs were starting to cramp up.

 _Rescue mission?_ she thought, sending up a mental plea to the rest of the team. _A rescue mission would be great right about now._

She shifted position, wincing as her shoulders twinged in protest. Her fingers were starting to tingle, meaning her circulation was probably getting cut off by the hard plastic ties. That wasn’t a good sign at all.

Footsteps from outside in the hall, several sets of heavily booted feet. Skye struggled to get her legs under her, trying to rise up into a crouch. 

“Put her in there with the other one. The drug should start to take effect in - ten minutes.”

Keys clinked together outside, then ground in the lock. The door creaked open, revealing a flash of fluorescent lighting and two men in uniforms. Skye’s attention was caught by the woman they held between them, each of them holding one of her arms. May’s face was bloody, one eye swollen shut and the other half-closed. More alarmingly, she didn’t struggle as the guards pushed her into the room and slammed the door behind her.

“May!” Skye stood as best she could, leaning on the wall for balance. May stayed on her knees, looking a bit unsteady. In the dim light from the bare bulb overhead, her injuries looked absolutely awful.

“Are you - are you okay?” _Real smart there. Clearly she’s fine, she’s just been tortured a bit and oh god she’s hurt what am I supposed to do -_ Simmons should be here, she would know how to patch up May and get her back to the invincible warrior she always was because she was looking way too vulnerable right now and Skye _didn’t know what to do._

She knelt awkwardly beside May, nearly overbalancing on her numb legs. “Do you wanna - lie down or something - maybe you’d better sit. Do you need help?” 

Not that she could really do much with her hands tied like this. Regardless, May shook her head ever so slightly, the first reaction she’d given yet and that was probably a good sign, that she was responding, right?

Skye watched with faint helplessness as May made her cautious way to the wall, where she slumped down, letting out a long breath. Her head thumped back against the damp brick, and she closed her eyes. 

In the silence that followed, Skye could catalogue the visible injuries May had sustained since they were separated - torn uniform revealing bruises across her shoulder, a dark stiffness to the cloth around her side that betrayed the bleeding wound beneath, knife wounds in her leg glimpsed through tears in the cloth. None of them were life threatening on their own - at least not yet. In conditions like these, any of those open wounds could develop an infection. And somehow, Skye didn’t think that HYDRA would be very enthusiastic about providing medical care to a couple of prisoners. 

Especially if if they had drugged her. That sounded a lot like the sort of sadistic scientific experiment that HYDRA would do.

She shuffled forward on her knees, wincing as the rough floor scraped her skin. 

“If you can get my hands unbound, I can try to bandage those,” Skye said, jerking her chin at the open wounds. There was a pause, then May nodded jerkily, visibly steeling herself. Skye turned, giving her access to the zip ties, and bit her lip as she felt May’s fingers tugging at them. They cut into her wrist for a brief moment, then snapped free.

Skye settled back on her heels, rubbing at her wrists where the ties had chafed her skin raw.

“Alright,” she said, trying to keep the waver out of her voice. May’s head had lolled back against her shoulder, as though the exertion of freeing Skye had exhausted her. And yeah, that sorta terrified Skye. Unshakable Agent May, looking more than a little - defeated.

(Puncture wounds up the side of May's neck, needle tracks in bright red. How long had they said it would be before whatever it was kicked in?)

She fumbled at the hem of her uniform, tearing free a strip of cloth and trying to remember the first aid basics Simmons had taught her. _Focus_. As long as she took it one step at a time - well, at least she wouldn’t panic.

Not panicking was always a good first step.

“Let’s see about getting you patched up,” she said, trying to insert a note of false confidence into her voice. It fell flat in her own ears, coming off as a little too desperate.

One step at a time, anyways.

***

Skye’s internal clock had never been the most accurate, but she was pretty sure that it was fairly early in the morning - two or three, maybe - when she jerked awake, not sure when she had fallen asleep in the first place. 

What had woken her up was immediately obvious, though.

May moved again, a faint noise escaping her lips, and while it wasn’t quite a pained sound (or at least, it wasn’t quite a sound that Skye’s brain _wanted_  to interpret as pained) it was certainly alarming. And the flush high across her cheeks, the faint glitter of her eyes--

“Shit,” Skye muttered, scrambling to her feet and hurrying over to kneel at May’s side. A brush of her fingers against the senior agent’s forehead was enough to confirm what she already knew - May was running a high fever.

_Jeez, how many ways can this situation get worse?_

“Hey. Talk to me, agent.”

May’s lips parted, and it took Skye a second to recognize the huffed sound as laughter. That was - a good sign, right? That she was laughing?

She tentatively reached for the bandage she had wrapped around the worse of May’s wounds - the gaping gash in her right thigh, the edges jagged like it had been ripped rather than sliced - and peeled back the edge of the cloth, now crusted with dried blood. May shuddered, but gave no other sign of pain.

Stoic to a fault, that was Melinda May. 

“Did they tell you what they were after?” Skye asked, replacing the bandage carefully. It looked awful - red lines radiating out from the wound, which meant bad things. Infections and blood poisoning and the like. 

May coughed, then rasped, “The usual.”

“Yeah, I bet.” _The - yeah, I’m not even gonna ask._ She tried for light-heartedness, hoping to keep May’s attention on staying awake. “Are you going to make it through the night, or should I start worrying?”

“I’ve survived worse.”

“Right.” It wasn’t exactly _comforting,_ but Skye would take what she could get. She settled down against the wall beside May, stretching out her legs. “D’you - need me to keep talking? ‘Cause I can do that. But I can also shut up if I’m being annoying.”

A long pause, and Skye felt May’s shoulder lift and fall in an abortive shrug. “Talk to me.”

Skye nodded. “Okay. Did I tell you that I’m really glad you came along with me? Because I’d probably be dead right now if you weren’t here.”

“--’s just my duty. As your SO.” May’s words were a bit slurred, Skye noted with alarm. 

“You’re a hell of a lot better than my last SO,” she responded vehemently. “Anyways, I can totally just talk in your ear about coding or something for the next few hours, but maybe that wouldn’t be a good idea because it might actually bore you to sleep, so - yeah.”

May sighed. “Talk about whatever you want.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Skye took a deep breath, fixing her gaze on the lightbulb overhead, the flickering light drilling into her eyes, preparing to launch into as long a speech as she could manage.

***

Her throat was dry and her voice hoarse by the time she finally trailed off - she had resorted to babbling about anything at all that came to mind, from the first time she hacked a government site (illegal, probably not something she should be mentioning to a SHIELD agent) to how _annoying_ it was when Simmons left her coffee mugs in places where they were likely to collide with Skye's elbow (irritating indeed, but she would give anything to be back on the Bus now, booby traps or no).

She glanced sideways at May. "You still with me?"

A long, drawn-out pause, in which she could hear her own breathing too loud in her ears - and then May nodded.

“Hey.” Skye swallowed past the sudden constriction in her throat. “Stay with me. You’re not allowed to just–” She didn't finish the sentence, not sure she wanted to say anything stupid out loud. Seemed a bit too much like tempting fate.

There was a twitch at the corner of May’s mouth that might have been a bitter smile. Her eyes, which had been shut, opened for a brief, sharp glance at Skye. “I don’t think many would think it much of a loss.”

“What?” Skye blinked, nonplussed. “I - _what?_ You do realize how much you mean to this team, right? To all of us?” 

May shrugged.

“Honestly. The first time I saw you, I knew you weren’t someone to mess with. I mean--” Skye chuckled, rolling her eyes. “You’re basically the _definition_ of secret agent. And could definitely still break me if you decided to. Which, let me tell you, was freaking _terrifying_ back when I first joined the team.”

A faint, rhythmic sound started up somewhere high above them. It took Skye a second to place the sound, but when she did, a smile broke across her face. "Hear that? Helicopters. Definitely our extraction team, airdropping in to save our butts. Took them long enough."

She reached out, grasping May's shoulder gently.

"Look at me." And May had said the same thing to her, over and over, hadn't she - _look at me, concentrate, you can do this._ In training and in the heat of crisis, May had been a steadying force - and now it was Skye's turn to repay the favor.

May met her eyes, the older agent's gaze fever-bright and dazed.

"Just––" She swallowed, closed her eyes, tried again. "You will make it. That's an order."

"You don't get to give me orders," May rasped.

Skye smiled, despite it all. The helicopter noise was getting closer, mingled with the sound of muffled gunfire. "You can take me to task for that once we're back on the Bus. Sir."


End file.
